How to find mushrooms without losing your kidney (THE TIMES september 2009)

By Alex Renton

We found our first chanterelles in early August, in a birch wood above Loch Sunart in Morvern. Stags were barking their challenges just over the hill and the little golden trumpets hiding in the long grass beside the path seemed as always to herald the thrills of a generous autumn.
But there’s hardly been two consecutive days of mushroom-encouraging sunshine in Scotland since: in fact, I haven’t been able to mow the lawn since July. And, though experienced foragers say that it’s a good season, I have not yet seen another chanterelle in the usual Lothian hideaways.
Here in Scotland, a number of fungi-hunters say that they are staying at home this season, put off by the awful poisoning story from a house party in Moray last September.
The writer Nicholas Evans and his wife Charlotte, as well as her brother, Sir Alistair Gordon-Cumming and his wife, Louise, all ended up on dialysis machines in hospital after picking and eating mushrooms that they had wrongly identified as chanterelles — or possibly as the common cep, Boletus edulis. At least two of them were left in need of kidney transplants. Yet the Gordon-Cummings were experienced mushroom pickers, walking on their own estate.
Roy Watling, the eminent mycologist who is brought into most mushroom poisoning cases in the UK, was sent the remains of the Moray mushroom supper. He identified them as Cortinarius rubellus (or speciosissimus), an orange-brown toadstool that is justifiably known as the Deadly Webcap.
He was surprised because, by the look of it, the fungus hasn’t much in common with chanterelle at all. The colour is a richer orange than the chanterelles’ gold, and it is far sturdier, with a heavy stalk. Nor do cortinarius look like ceps. “I don’t understand how they could have mistaken them,” he says.
I’ve been on mushroom hunts with Watling: gloriously entertaining, but he is always very stern when he warns against such confusions over identification.
“It’s a very strange psychological phenomenon that affects even quite intelligent people,” he says. “You could call it a fungus frenzy. Anything that pops up, they go for. But it is Russian roulette out there if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Recently, he was sent some wild mushrooms that had put a young man in North Wales into intensive care. The mushrooms turned out to be an edible species, but so old and decrepit that, in Watling’s judgment, the boy had got E.coli from them Watling thinks that the spread of wild food reality shows on TV has been dangerous: a while ago, he watched one eminent celebrity chef joyously picking what Roy could see were false chanterelles — not harmful, but hardly edible. “If you want to eat wild things — mushrooms, berries, or even leaves for a salad — you jolly well get yourself organised.”
If you are organised and you have got some chanterelles (you need a good book to identify them positively) there are few things lovelier.
Frustrated by my foraging failures, I bought some at the greengrocer on Tuesday and had them on toast with poached egg and chorizo, a recipe from the Leith chef-restaurateur Tom Kitchin’s new book of seasonal cooking, From Nature to Plate (Orion Books).
Kitchin fries girolles or chanterelles in oil and then adds some chopped shallot, garlic, a few shreds of chorizo, parsley and thyme.
My favourite mushrooming book is the Collins How to Identify Edible Mushrooms.